Agents Are Here

🌱 This post is still growing

Late last year I started writing I'm Out On Agents. Agents sucked, the models were good, but there was still something missing between the harnesses and the models. They could write good code, they could do some debugging and exploring, but they were too good at fucking up the whole project to be useful. They could crank out Green Field POC’s like nobody’s business, but they created so much mess in brown field projects that it was easier to chat and edit yourself.

The Inflection Point #

It’s very well agreed on that the inflection point for most people happened with Anthropic Opus 4.5 in late Nov 2025. Early adopters probably noticed right away and shouted from the rooftops how good it was. But we’ve all heard that developers have 6 months before ai writes all the code for years, so this felt like the rest of the noise.

Hitting the December slowdown many of us hit code freezes at work. We completely disconnect from work for the last Week and come back in January. During this time, its very common for us to try out new tools, new techniques work on side projects, create POC for that thing we never have time for. While it looks like less features coming into the apps we support this is an important time for us to explore and reflect.

Anthropic was super generous with a free tier giving out huge levels of free tokens at the time. So many of us laughed and threw it at our side projects expecting the normal garbage output, but maybe some good ideas to come from it. But that’s not what was happening anymore, somehow these agents do some real work, follow plans and stick to scope really well. And if you lay out a big enough plan they tended to keep cooking and completing features.

January 2026 #

flu season

For me and many others around the country we were hit with a rough flu season, kicking in and draining us mentally for a good month or so. I wanted to work, I was getting excited about some projects and wanted to get them going, but I was constantly wiped and had no capacity. I had no ability to think on complex tasks, I was coughing all the time, just trying to survive, but yet wanted to do something. I started doing some small clean up, some work on side projects.

At this point I was still afraid of really letting agents cut loose on something meaningful, something that users depend on.

February 2026 #

what just happened?

yes or –dangerously-accept #

March 2026 #

April 2026 #

Closing the editor #